Given that most of us are busy marketers, busy small business owners who have a lot of things on our hands to juggle, it can often be difficult to keep up the social media marketing effort. Despite how little time one has, one can’t ignore the importance of tweeting daily. Fortunately, there are plenty of free tools available online that can make tweeting a breeze.

These nifty tools help you keep up with updates any time anywhere, make sharing information convenient and help you manage the time you have allocated to social media marketing, more efficiently. We have compiled a list of our favorite tools and shall keep updating it as and when we discover a new tool that helps us do the job better.

TweetDeck: A stand-alone adobe-air application that shows you the status updates, your DMs, replies, favorites and more, all on the same screen. TweetDEck is also available for Iphone. Why we like it -

• Unlike with your home page on twitter.com, you do not need to refresh your browser every now and then to see updates. Tweetdeck’s browser refreshes on its own periodically and intimates you with a sound effect when there are new notfications (updates).
• Lets you manage multiple accounts without the need to switch from one to another.
• Has a nice local trends feature.
• You can save searches and follow in real-time.

Tweepular: Lets you manage your followers and those you follow on twitter. Why we like it -

• Easily see the list of those whom you follow but do not follow you back. And the list of those who follow you but are not followed by you.
• Shows brief bios and last tweets on rolling mouse over the profiles.
• Bulk follow/unfollow feature.
• Intuitive interface.

TweetCube: With this application, you can upload and share files like pdf, zip. jpeg, videos, songs with other twitter users. The maximum upload size is 10mb currently but you can upload as many files as you want. Files are deleted after a period of 30 days.

TweetLater: recognizes that we are humans and can’t be on twitter 24 hours a day. Yet we want to be heard by people in other parts of the world, who are active on twitter at times different from ours. TweetLater lets you create and save tweets to published at a later date and time. Why we like it -

• You can save tweets to be published at night.
• Tweets can also be specified to be rotated, that is published more than one.
• Provides integration with your bit.ly account, so lets you tracks clicks on your bit.ly urls.
• Can handle multiple twitter accounts.

TwitterFeed: This nifty app tweets every new blog post you write. Simply add your feed urls to your twitterfeed account and each time you publish a post on your blog, it will tweet info on the blog post. Why we like it -

• Does away with a lot of copy and paste headache.
• Lets you track the clicks you get from the tweet.

TwitterBar: A firefox plugin that lets you post directly from firefox. Why we like it -

• No need to copy and paste a url from one application to another.
• No need to access multiple apps to share a link.

This is definitely not an exhaustive list. Its just those apps that have made tweeting easier for us. Newer tools are being launched everyday and checking each one out can be an overwhelming experience. You can find out more about the various twitter tools available at these sites.

http://mashable.com/2008/05/24/14-more-twitter-tools/

http://www.openjason.com/2009/01/08/100-twitter-tools/

Let us know too what you find useful!

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